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Bridge Daughter

A young girl must bear her mother's child—the first book of the Bridge Daughter Cycle!

"The thought-provoking story blends action, introspection, and social commentary in a stark but indirect critique of efforts to control female bodies and restrict reproductive rights.” – Publishers Weekly

Just as I was amazed at the prizewinning origami displayed at Paper Tree in San Francisco’s Japantown (inspiration for a chapter in Bridge Daughter), Setting the Crease likewise is a demonstration of crafting stunning sculptures from flat paper. “No cuts, no tears, no glue.”

Calling itself a blog dedicated to “paper-based procrastination,” the origami is part of Setting the Crease‘s “365-2017” project: a new origami model for each day of the year.

Kindle Scout winner R. J. Vickers has posted an incredibly thorough insider’s guide to Kindle Scout over at BookRazor. If you have any interest in Kindle Scout (and if you’re a fiction writer, you should), check out her savvy break-down of the program: its benefits and drawbacks, it short-term challenges and long-term gains.

The lights went dim on the Bridge Daughter campaign Friday night around 9pm Pacific time (midnight on the East Coast). Did it end with a bang or a whimper? I would say it ended…on an up-note.

As I wrote last time, campaign activity dropped off after Week Two. What I didn’t realize when I wrote that post is how long the trough would sustain. Bridge Daughter had enjoyed a perch on the Kindle Scout Hot & Trending list for nearly two complete weeks, then fell off entirely, save for a few days when it resurfaced for a couple of hours. After reading other messages on the kboards Writers’ Cafe, I discovered I wasn’t alone—it appears Week Three of the campaign is a quiet stretch for more than a few nominees.

Fortunately, Bridge Daughter rebounded in Week Four and ended with a strong finish: four straight days on the Hot & Trending charts for 24 hours each day. It looks like the interest rekindles (no pun) when a book lands on the “Ending Soon” list, which gives it some prominence on the Kindle Scout home page. It also adds a little urgency to the readers, letting them know that if they want to see a book published, they need to vote now, and not put it off.

I’m out of energy to write more about Kindle Scout at the moment. It was fortunate the campaign concluded Friday evening. It’s nice to have a weekend to myself. I realized toward the end of Week Three that not a day had passed since the campaign started that I wasn’t fretting over it: writing emails, arranging advertising, social media, working on my blog…it adds up.

Now I wait for Amazon to evaluate the campaign results and my manuscript and return to me with a yea or a nay.

Every so often I meet a writer who proudly proclaims he or she is anti-Aristotelian—maybe not in such formal terms, but that’s what they’re saying. “Stories don’t require a beginning, middle, and end,” they announce, or “I don’t write plot-driven fiction. My characters don’t do anything. They exist on the page.”

Then, at the next writers’ group meeting, they bring in a short story that meanders and goes nowhere. Six or eight intelligent people squirm in their chairs trying to find something positive to say about a story that bored them into a coma.

Once I knew a guy who only smoked unfiltered cigarettes, a pack a day. “If you’re going to smoke,” he told me, “smoke for God’s sake.”

If you’re going to break the rules when writing fiction, break all of them, not only the “cool” ones. Don’t use fiction to signal your artistry. Be an artist. Write these stories:

Employ a deus ex machina. Trap your characters in an unwinnable situation and then have an all-powerful entity arrive and deliver them to safety.

Write a plot-driven story. Make your characters complete cardboard.

Tell a story using only summary and exposition.

Don’t give your characters an internal subjective logic, that is, they can’t even defend their actions or beliefs to themselves. Doing something to be cruel or for immediate gratification has an internal logic; your characters should do things randomly and wantonly.

Write a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Lop off the beginning and end. Or, lop off the beginning and middle.

Resist in medias res. Don’t start your story in the middle of things. Start it hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands years in the past. Or, start it hundreds of years in the future and never return to the main events, i.e. no flashbacks or time travel.

Write these stories, then write them again. And then write them again. After a year of breaking the rules, you’ll know if you’re an avant-garde writer or not.

At least you’ll have a better idea of what avant-garde really means in the realm of fiction, and not its surface interpretation so popular in our times. And, you’ll learn that the rules of fiction are not rules as much as hard-earned lessons of what succeeds and what fails when telling a story.

I’m one of the contestants lined up for the next Write Club SF! As their slogan goes, “Literature as Bloodsport. Prize Money to charity,” which means this event has a heart—ripped beating from each contender’s twitching, still-warm body.

I hope you’ll make it there and root me on. I’ve selected St. Anthony’s as my charity, so this great nonprofit will receive the proceeds if I win. At Write Club the audience selects the victor, so your attendance counts in more ways than one.